It is more comparable with AWS Aurora, since this is a compatible reimplementation and _not_ a MySQL box with beefed up hardware specs.
Cloud SQL isn't a compatible reimplementation, it's the same vanilla MySQL that you know and love, but with a few tweaks (such as removal of SUPER privileges so you can't bork your backups, which is rather important as a managed service).
Second Generation instances should have better uptime than First Generation, as we now have live migration ala GCE if the host machine requires maintenance, and we can upgrade much of the infrastructure without restarting MySQL as we used to.
We do have failover capabilities for Second Generation instances if a zone goes down, so we're hoping between failover between zones and host migration we should have some really good uptime.
Any idea on how long a failover takes? Seems to be about 30 seconds for First generation cloud SQL, is it the same-ish for 2nd generation?
Only thing I don't love about the Cloud SQL is the failover time, but I guess if it stays at 30 seconds and doesn't fail too much - it is still way better than trying to run my own SQL server.
If it's host maintenance (the machine your database is on needs to be brought down) then you should "see" the same results as Google Compute Engine live migration, which is that you hopefully see nothing :) This was one of the most common reasons a first gen instance would require restarting, alongside us pushing updates. So nixing that one, alongside the other non-restarting updates we can do now, is good stuff.
If a whole zone goes down, we start the failover process automatically for you. This is order minutes. It won't be seamless, but zones going down is hopefully a very rare occurrence.
I have a small product on a gen1 D1 with 512 mb ram. I wonder how that compares to a db-g1-small in performance. db-g1-small has more memory but not sure if it is as apples to apples as that..
What's different is that if we needed to make a change that required only querying MySQL, such as listing your databases in the UI, we would still need to bounce your instance for that functionality to come up with First Gen. With Second Gen we don't need to, so we can add many new features without restarting MySQL. I don't want to speak out of turn lest the lawyercats that come up with SLA numbers and such find me, but I am personally confident that once we exit beta, most customers should generally experience better than the 99.95% uptime we have SLA for First Gen.